Comment

Shock, awe and precision porkies

Our military people haven't been telling us the truth, have they? Every day they tell us stuff - either directly, through press conferences and statements, or through private briefings with our more credulous television journalists - and 12 hours later the reverse of what they've told us turns out to have happened.

Here are a few examples.

Day one of the war will begin with the unrestrained bombing of Baghdad, a massive "shock and awe" assault that will make the world quiver in its boots with respect.

In fact, Baghdad suffered comparatively light bombing on night one. It was not, everybody agreed the next morning, quite what we had all expected.

Coalition forces have taken the "strategically important" town of Umm Qasr, we were told on day two.

No, actually, they hadn't, as they were decent enough to admit two days later. They still haven't taken it as I write this. Ditto those oilfields they kept on about and then, very suddenly, stopped going on about.

The third night of the bombing of Baghdad would be remembered, after the war, as the most significant and punitive so far, with a magnificent flattening of the city. (This was an off-the-record briefing repeated ad nauseam by BBC News 24 throughout the previous evening).

In fact, the third night saw by far the lightest bombing of the war so far.

The coalition forces have no intention of taking Basra because it would involve street fighting and therefore a potential danger to civilians.

So, to clarify, then: Basra is indeed, now, a target. Because, er, otherwise there would be a danger to civilians, a veritable humanitarian catastrophe.

Saddam Hussein was killed or seriously injured in the initial two bombing raids on Baghdad. An ambulance was seen taking him to hospital.

Well, I'm no doctor, but Saddo seems still to be in pretty good health to me. Quite chipper, in fact. Maybe he just had bad gout, or something.

What's more, Tariq Aziz is dead. Or he has fled. One of the two. We're not absolutely certain, but we think so.

Nope, good old Tariq's happy and well and still addressing the nation. Yesterday morning, mind, the allies did succeed in killing some Ba'ath party bigwig in Basra. So, at least they've managed to knock off the equivalent of the deputy mayor of Birmingham.

And Saddam Hussein's entire government is disintegrating. It's falling apart!

Is it? It has never looked more integrated, to me. Just about every government minister has, in the past five days, held press conferences for the foreign media. We've even had the Iraqi equivalent of Alan Milburn appear, which is a bonus none of us could have expected. And for which we're very grateful.

Those are just a few of the porkies or examples of deluded wishful thinking. And the question that occurs is this: are they deliberately lying to us in order, one would assume, to mislead the enemy - or do they really not have a clue what's going on? My guess is that it's a mixture of the two. They're lying from time to time and they often don't have a clue what's going on. Which is a bit of a worry.

Not because we shouldn't be lied to per se, but because no matter what happens on the ground, militarily, we're beginning to lose the propaganda war across the world, if it were not already lost to begin with.

I'm quite prepared to believe that the war is being prosecuted with military excellence; the relatively low number of civilians - and coalition servicemen - killed would seem to provide some evidence of this. But the impression created through either deliberately misleading statements or wildly optimistic pronouncements is one of either deviousness or ineptitude or both.

And by contrast, the Iraqis are holding short and apparently candid briefings enlivened, on occasion, by the picturesque shaking of a wall as another coalition bomb hits some part of Baghdad where nobody important is.

Maybe it's time Alastair Campbell got more involved.

Spare us from any more national days

I'm still stuck at home recovering from national No Smoking Day. This year, it almost killed me, but I will continue to stick to my vow.

Which is, simply, to double my usual intake of nicotine for the designated 24 hours. Usually this is pleasurable. But the trouble is, since leaving the BBC, with its horrid, smoke-free corridors, my intake has already increased to about 60 a day, anyway. So this year, I had to try to cram in 120 cigarettes, which meant setting the alarm for 0500 to give myself a head start and, during the late evening, occasionally smoking two or three cigarettes at once. I managed it, but my chest still hurts and when I woke up the other morning there was a shrivelled brown thing on the pillow next to me. I think it was part of a lung, or perhaps my oesophagus. I wondered for a moment about maybe cramming it back down my throat and then going back to sleep, but it looked too unappetising for that. So I just left it there, for the children to play with, or the cat.

Still, at least I shall die in a state of grace, principles intact.

I don't know what it is that makes me hate national days so much. I loathe Red Nose Day, every simpering, witless second of it, even though I'm well aware that it is doing good for somebody, somewhere. And that's the important thing, isn't it?

While at Today, I tried every trick in the book to stop the programme becoming embroiled in those fatuous stunts such as having Michael Heseltine interview John Humphrys instead of the other way around, ho ho ho, or making guests wear those bloody stupid plastic noses. I liked the idea that Today might be a tiny oasis of resistance, cynicism and churlishness. But some mindless jape usually crept in under the wire.

Adolescent petulance and a tinge of intellectual snobbery is behind my disaffection, probably. But there's also - if this is not stretching the case a little - a rather nasty Orwellian element to these compulsory, telecentred love-ins. So, if I find more stuff on the pillow in the next week or so and do, indeed, finally expire, you'll know that I died for you, fighting fascism.

To absurdity and beyond

An eagle-eyed Guardian reader, Rosemary Davies, saw Geoff Hoon being all sombre on the box the other day and noticed that, in the background, the film Toy Story 2 was playing on the television monitor. Two thoughts occur. Either Geoff was explaining the war to his kids using Buzz Lightyear and his arch enemy Zorg to represent Tony Blair and Saddam respectively. Or maybe Geoff, unaccountably, feels a profound empathy with that other Toy Story character, Mr Potato Head.

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